When Pep Guardiola first arrived in Manchester City in 2016, Yaya Touré, Vincent Kompany and David Silva were still at the club. By the end of this season, Sergio Aguero will join them in pastures new, signalling the end of a glorious era.
After spending a decade in Eastlands, the Argentine leaves with ten major trophies, one for every season (and more to come by the end of this one), and a host of goal scoring records.
This was Aguero’s meat and two veg: bursting the net at every available opportunity. He has done this to devastating effect, scoring 257 goals in 384 appearances for the Blues. It took him just six years to become City’s top goalscorer of all time, breaking Eric Brook’s 78-year record when scoring against Napoli in the Champions League on 1 November 2017.
Aguero, who is linked with a move to Barcelona, stands fourth in the list of the Premier League’s all-time goalscorers with 181 strikes to his name, making him the top overseas scorer in league history. He seemed destined to overtake the 187 mark set by Andy Cole, but with injury curtailing his playing time it looks as if he will miss out on that one.
The sheer volume of his exploits is difficult to fathom, though. In the Premier League he has scored a goal roughly once every 108 minutes, easily the best goals-to-minutes ratio in the division’s history. That also translates to a 0.83 goals per 90 minutes, an absolutely insane rate of scoring.
With 48 assists tacked on for good measure, Aguero’s minutes per goal involvement ratio is unsurprisingly also the best in the league’s history, providing a goal or assist once every 85 minutes. That’s 1.06 goal involvements per 90, a frankly ridiculous level of consistency rarely, if ever, seen before.
Although the diminutive striker has only scored once this term, he has managed to score 20 or more league goals in a single season six times. Only the mighty Alan Shearer can say he has done so more often, reaching the 20-goal seven times.
One category the Argentine has surpassed the Newcastle legend in the record books is hat-tricks. Shearer scored 11 Premier League trebles in his career, while Aguero has 12 after putting three past Aston Villa in a 6-1 victory in January 2020.
Remarkably, Aguero has only won the Golden Boot once in all his outstanding years in the Premier League, in 2014/15 when he scored 26 goals. Bizarrely, he also didn’t feature in a PFA Team of the Year until 2017/18, an oversight that doubly corrected when he was voted in by his peers a second successive time the next season.
Given his otherworldly numbers to date, it’s fun to imagine just how many goals Aguero would have scored had he joined a Premier League club from an earlier age, or had simply been less injured as often as he was. Would he have beaten Shearer’s tally of 260 goals? He’d have surely given it a good crack.
But the one statistic that stands out for this writer is, with all the goals he scored, just one of them was scored after the 90th minute. You know the one:
Aguerrrrrrrrooooooooooo!!!
Read: Eight of the best Premier League title-clinching goals: Cole, Adams, Aguero
See Also: The greatest Premier League title races ever: Keegan’s rant, Gerrard’s slip, Agueroooooo
